Category Archives: Retirement Planning

An estate plan has three objectives. The first goal is to preserve your accumulated wealth. The second goal is to express who will receive your assets after your death. The third goal is to state who will make medical and financial decisions on your behalf if you cannot.

Over time, your feelings about these objectives may change. You may want to name a new executor or health care agent. You may rethink how you want your wealth distributed.

This is why it is so vital to review your estate plan. Over ten or twenty years, your health, wealth, and outlook on life may change profoundly. The key is to recognize the life events that may call for an update.

Have you just married or divorced? If so, your estate plan will absolutely need revision. For that matter, some, or all, of your will may now be legally invalid. (Some state laws strike down existing wills when a person is married or divorced.) If your children or grandchildren marry or divorce, that also calls for an estate plan review.1

Has there been a loss or serious illness within your family? If so, your named executor or health care agent may have to be changed. If one family member has now become physically or financially dependent on you, that too may be an occasion for a second look at the plan.

Has your net worth risen or declined substantially since the plan was first implemented? If you have become much wealthier in the past five or ten years (or much less wealthy), that circumstance may have altered your vision of how you want your assets distributed at your death. Maybe you want to give more (or less) to charity or your heirs. A large inheritance can also prompt you to rethink your wealth protection and wealth transfer strategy.

Have you changed your mind about what your wealth should accomplish? Today, you may view your wealth differently than you did when you were younger. New purposes may have emerged for it – new roles that it can play. Following through on those thoughts may lead you to reconsider aspects of your estate plan.

Have your executors or trustees changed their mind about their roles? If they are no longer interested in shouldering those responsibilities, no longer alive, or no longer of sound mind or reputable character, it is revision time.

Have you retired, moved to another state, or bought or sold real estate? All of these events call for an estate plan check-up.

The first step in revising an estate plan is to update essential documents. Not just your will or your trust, but also your financial power of attorney and health care proxy. Review all the names: your executor; your trustee; your health care agent. Changes in your personal (and even your business) relationships may call for alterations to those choices.

The second step is to review your risk management. Does language in your will need revision? Does a trust created years ago need to be modified or replaced? Do new estate planning vehicles need to enter the picture in order to help you adequately transfer wealth, counter estate taxes, or endow charities?

What about your life insurance? Do beneficiary forms of life insurance policies need updating? Is corporate-owned life insurance coverage you once counted on now absent? Will policy payouts be sufficient enough to help your loved ones address financial issues after your death?

The third step is to make sure your assets are in sync with your plan. For example, if you have a revocable trust, have you transferred ownership of all the assets that are supposed to go into it? Have you acquired new assets that need to be “poured in?”

If you are married and it appears certain that your estate will be taxed, you may want to own some assets and have your spouse own others. Yes, the federal estate tax exemption is portable, so any unused estate tax and gift tax exemption is allowed to pass to a surviving spouse. At the state level, though, there are different rules. So if all assets are in your spouse’s name and your home state levies an estate tax, that scenario may mean higher estate taxes for your heirs than if those assets were alternately owned by either you or your spouse.2

Even if nothing major happens in your life, review your plan every five years or so. While your life may be uneventful over five years, tax law, the financial markets, and business climates may change significantly. Those kinds of shifts can impact your estate planning strategy.

This material was prepared by MarketingPro, Inc., and does not necessarily represent the views of the presenting party, nor their affiliates. This information has been derived from sources believed to be accurate. Please note – investing involves risk, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If assistance is needed, the reader is advised to engage the services of a competent professional. This information should not be construed as investment, tax or legal advice and may not be relied on for the purpose of avoiding any Federal tax penalty. This is neither a solicitation nor recommendation to purchase or sell any investment or insurance product or service, and should not be relied upon as such. All indices are unmanaged and are not illustrative of any particular investment.

Putting Too Much in Company Stock

A classic mistake that can come back to haunt you.

Have you invested too much of your 401(k) in company stock? This can happen – and you may not be fully aware of it.

Back when corporations offered traditional pension plans, the federal government watched out for this tendency. In 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) made it illegal for pension plans to invest more than 10% of their assets in company shares. These days, the employee-directed 401(k) is the default workplace retirement plan – but ERISA doesn’t limit the amount of 401(k) assets that can be directed into company stock.1

If the stock flops, how big a hit will you take? Pre-retirees with too much of their nest egg in company stock may recognize the risk. The debacles at Enron, Tyco and WorldCom are still fresh in the memory. Even so, recognition may not prompt them to diversify their portfolios.

What factors promote this problem? Psychology plays a role. After years of working for a large company, employees come to believe in its stability – it should continue to do well, it should be around for years to come. (Past success is interpreted as an indicator of future performance.) This optimism may be the biggest reason why 401(k) plan participants overweight their portfolios in company stock.

Employer encouragement – however overt or subtle – is another factor. At the end of 2011, the Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) and the Investment Company Institute (ICI) took a snapshot of 401(k) asset allocations and found that 58% of businesses with 5,000 or more employees offered their workers company shares as a 401(k) investment option. Some corporations even match employee 401(k) contributions with stock shares.1,2

Breaking the surveyed 401(k) programs down further, the survey determined that about 6% of plan participants had more than 80% of their 401(k) assets invested in their employer’s stock. About 5% of plan participants aged 40-49 had 31-40% of their 401(k) assets invested in company shares; about 6% of plan participants aged 60-69 had 21-30% of their plan assets invested in company stock.2

The classic maxim is to avoid putting more than 20% of your retirement plan assets in company stock at any time, especially if that weighting amounts to more than 20% of your overall retirement savings.1

What do you do if you’re overweighted? First, you want to determine if you are – and you may own more of your employer’s stock than you initially think. Employer matches, stock options, and even mutual funds that invest in the company may increase your exposure.

A financial professional can help you look at metrics that could give you a picture of the fundamentals, volatility and risk surrounding the stock. If you do find that you hold too much of it for comfort, it is time to diversify – but make sure you are aware of any restrictions on selling the shares before you take the next step.

Remember the virtues of diversification. As you get older, you have less time to make back portfolio losses, and so there is less wisdom in investing heavily in a single stock. Allocating your retirement assets across different types of investments may help you to “insulate” more of your retirement savings in the event of a downturn or a particularly volatile market. Lessening the amount of company stock in your portfolio has another potential plus: it reduces the potential correlation between your financial future and the future health of the company.

This material was prepared by MarketingLibrary.Net Inc., and does not necessarily represent the views of the presenting party, nor their affiliates. All information is believed to be from reliable sources; however we make no representation as to its completeness or accuracy. Please note – investing involves risk, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If assistance is needed, the reader is advised to engage the services of a competent professional. This information should not be construed as investment, tax or legal advice and may not be relied on for the purpose of avoiding any Federal tax penalty. This is neither a solicitation nor recommendation to purchase or sell any investment or insurance product or service, and should not be relied upon as such. All indices are unmanaged and are not illustrative of any particular investment.

Section 105 Plans

Medical reimbursement plans to benefit the smallest businesses.

Some businesses start small and stay small, by design. You may own such a business. Perhaps things begin and end with you, or maybe you employ one other person – your spouse. If this is the case, you should know about Section 105 plans.

Being self-employed, you already know that you can deduct 100% of your healthcare premiums from your federal and state taxes. The tax savings needn’t stop there. A properly structured Section 105 plan may let you deduct 100% of your family’s out-of-pocket medical expenses from federal, state and FICA/Medicare taxes.1,2

That’s right – all of them. TASC, a major provider of microbusiness employee benefits administration services, estimates that a Section 105 plan saves a family an average of $5,000 in taxes a year.2

How does this work? Section 105 of the Internal Revenue Code permits a self-employed person to set up a health reimbursement arrangement (HRA) for tax-free repayment of major qualified medical expenses not covered under a health plan. Alternately, that self-employed individual may hire a salaried employee (read: his/her spouse) and offer that employee an HRA.1,3

If the latter choice is made, the benefits offered will not only cover the employee, but also his/her spouse and dependents. So if the new hire is the business owner’s spouse, what results is effectively a family healthcare expense account.1

Most solopreneurs need to hire someone to get this perk. Can you set up a Section 105 plan without hiring an employee? Yes, if your business is a C-corp, an S-corp, or an LLC that files its federal tax return as a corporation. In a corporate structure, the corporation is defined as the employer and the business owner is defined as a salaried employee.1,3

Otherwise, hiring an employee is a precondition to implementing a Section 105 plan. You don’t necessarily have to hire your spouse – the new hire could be your son or daughter, a more distant relative, or even someone to whom you aren’t related.1

Did the Affordable Care Act restrict the implementation of these plans? Not for microbusinesses. When the IRS issued Notice 2013-54 as a follow-up to the Affordable Care Act, most businesses lost the chance to offer a discrete medical reimbursement plan. One-employee HRAs are still allowed under Section 105 using group or individual insurance coverage.2

Look at all you can potentially deduct. A properly designed Section 105 plan allows eligible employee(s) and their family/families to deduct all health and dental insurance premiums, all life and disability insurance premiums, all premiums for qualified long term care coverage, all Medicare Part A and Medigap premiums, all out-of-pocket medical, dental, and vision care expenses, psychiatric care, orthodontics … anything stipulated as a qualified medical expense in Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 105 plans can even be structured so that if an employee doesn’t max out his/her yearly deduction, the unused portion can be carried over to subsequent years.1

To keep up the plan, keep the paper trail going. A business owner and a financial or tax professional should collaborate to put a Section 105 plan into play. The IRS does look closely at these plans to check that the other spouse is legitimately employed – salaried, working a set schedule of hours, and hired per a written agreement. In addition, appropriate tax forms must be filed with the IRS, including Form 940 if the employee is unrelated to the business owner.1

If you want to lessen your tax liability and create an expense account to meet unanticipated medical costs, do what other microbusiness owners have done: set up a Section 105 plan.

This material was prepared by MarketingPro, Inc., and does not necessarily represent the views of the presenting party, nor their affiliates. This information has been derived from sources believed to be accurate. Please note – investing involves risk, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If assistance is needed, the reader is advised to engage the services of a competent professional. This information should not be construed as investment, tax or legal advice and may not be relied on for the purpose of avoiding any Federal tax penalty. This is neither a solicitation nor recommendation to purchase or sell any investment or insurance product or service, and should not be relied upon as such. All indices are unmanaged and are not illustrative of any particular investment.